Thursday, September 17, 2015

Executive Insights Delights the Audiences

As a new track at the IT/Dev Connections conference, the Executive Insights track, designed and run by Aragon Research, created a strategic path for the developer dominated conference. There were 1000+ participants at the IT/Dev that traditionally have had access to unvarnished and detailed development content, but little strategic content. Executive Insights drew from both the Aragon customer base and the traditional IT/Dev participants. This seems a good marriage based on my experience in this inaugural combination. The theme for the track was the challenge of the digital transformation, which many organizations are facing. Below were some of the highlights of the conference for me.

The keynote featured Roy Firestone who drew parallels between the sports world and life itself with a technology twist. Roy is more than an interviewer and proved it with his singing and dialog impersonations that kept the audience on the edge of their seat for 40 minutes. He was truly inspirational. Roy then interviewed Debby Landers the general manager of Kenexa and Smarter Workforce for IBM, where the discussion revolved around the transformations that are on deck for us as we move into the cognitive computing era.

The Detailed Agenda had rich content for organizations facing "big change" challenges. Respected speakers were chosen to give each topic the respect it deserved. Jim Lundy deserves kudos for is content and selection of presenters for this rich track.

Since I was too busy presenting through out the duration, my highlight was a full room working through the implications of the Internet of Things (IOT) where I presented the implications to the designs of processes, applications and systems with real live examples that ranged from shop floor healthcare, retail and smart logistics.

The track completed with a panel on the next generation CIO where Jim Lundy interviewed two accomplished CIOs with strong future visions for their respective organizations. Sheila Jordan of Symantec and Rob McGillen of Grant Thorton shared their past and current challenges and how they solved them. More importantly they shared where digital was taking their respective organizations.

Net; Net:

The Executive Insights Track at IT/Dev Connections was a great success and promised to get better and draw more of the technically inclined crowd. Now Aragon has a great experience for their customer base. I was privileged to participate